Postcards from America
Melania Trump tries to stay out of the spotlight, but it’s not possible.
On the last night, Melania appeared.
She moved like a silent film star through the Republican National Convention floor, a stiff wave of her hand here and there. She offered plenty of smiles but they came off as more like the little grin you give the dentist when he asks if you’re okay.
Melania didn’t step up to the microphone at the televised spectacle, bucking the modern tradition that the spouse of the presidential candidate uses that huge platform to praise their husband and talk about their character and what they are like to live with.
Behind the scenes, Republican party officials had begged her to at least introduce her husband, but she said no.
Since she was a child growing up in Slovenia, Melania has both hidden from and sought the spotlight. She arrived in the United States as a 26 year-old aspiring model and would sit through day-long New York City photo shoots barely saying a word. Photographers and others who knew her then said she viewed social events as a chore. Yet, she loved to walk the runway in front of crowds and aspired to be seen on the cover of magazines.
Mary travelled to the small town in the former Yugoslavia where Melania was born, and other places she lived, for her 2020 biography, Art of Her Deal. From those interviews, it’s clear Melania has always been an exceptionally quiet person, a loner. She keeps almost no one close and trusts very few. Her best friend was her mother, who recently passed away. She does not want to be too dependent on anyone, and to an exceptional degree, she operates apart from her husband.
When the Trumps were in the White House, staffers remarked how little communication there was between the East Wing, where the first lady’s office is located, and the West Wing. The Trumps keep separate bedrooms and have separate hobbies – he likes golf and politics and she likes fashion and design.
Melania, 54, is the third wife of 78 year-old Trump. He has publicly praised her for her “independence.” He also has complained that his second wife, Marla Maples, wanted him home for dinner and demanded his attention.
(About his first wife, Ivana, Trump said it was a mistake for her to take a job: “Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.”)
It’s not easy being married to Trump, who subsumes those around him, like a black hole in a red cap. In the rare interviews she has given, Melania has said she makes up her own mind about what she does and doesn’t do, and that she is not a prisoner to her husband.
“I have my own mind. I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me,” Melania said during Trump’s campaign in 2016. She also bristles at the idea that Trump helped with her modelling career, despite evidence that he (understandably) did.
Melania wants it known that she brings a lot to the Trump Show. She came from very little money, the daughter of a factory worker and chauffeur, and shared a one-bedroom apartment in New York when she arrived. Now she shuttles by private jet among three mansions and her husband’s worth, according to last year’s financial disclosure forms, was $1 billion.
She has certainly backed up her husband when he need it most. When directly asked about her husband’s nasty and false statements about Barack Obama not being born in America, she chose to support her husband’s questions about the validity of Obama’s birth certificate.
She also came through in a clutch moment in the 2016 campaign when Trump was caught on the Access Hollywood tape saying he wanted to “fuck” another woman.
Melania went on primetime and dismissed the lewd discussion as “boy talk” and called her husband a “gentleman.”
So ahead of this year’s election, when the anger and division is off the charts, Melania is as divisive as her husband.
People who plan to vote for Trump gush about how graceful and elegant she is. Trump’s critics see her as complicit, an enabler to his lies that have sowed unrest.
Earlier this year Trump was convicted of business fraud related to $130,000 in hush money he paid to a woman who alleged that she had sex with him, just after Melania gave birth. Melania never appeared in court with him, though other family members did, and has never spoken about it.
Her silence is particularly maddening to many when it comes to immigration, Trump’s signature issue. Critics ask how an immigrant from Slovenia can sit silently while he lashes out against undocumented immigrants and says they come to rape and kill?
Since Trump survived an assassination attempt last weekend, his detractors have become alarmed that he will return to the White House. His support has become more fervent and many now see him as a prophet, a death-dodging saviour with a big white pillow bandage hanging from his ear.
In a note posted on social media, Melania said the would-be assassin had almost devastated her by attempting to “ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music and inspiration.”
For this whole campaign, she has tried to stay invisible and silent, but it’s not possible. The scrutiny of her will only intensify.
At the end of Trump’s 93-minute rambling convention speech in Milwaukee, Melania joined her husband on stage.
When he leaned over to kiss her, their exchange was as awkward as two teenagers under the front porch light.
She quickly took two steps away from him and never said a word, but she was there, at his side.